May not color be of more importance in botany than the system-makers have supposed? How did flowers come by their colors?
If two colors are placed in juxtaposition, to produce the most pleasing effect they should be complementary, as red and green, orange and blue, yellow and purple. What, now, is Nature's method among her flowers?
He who has seen the calypso will remember it as the rarest of color-gems. The petals are of brilliant purple, the lip, deep within of gorgeous yellow, shades off into purple inoculated with darker purple. This floral gem is painted in two colors complementary to each other.
From calypso, which is rare, you pass to a flower of the same family which is not uncommon, the showy lady's-slipper (Cypripedium spectabile). In this we have three colors. The petals are snow-white, the lip is lustrous white melting into magenta, which in turn deepens into purple, and the sterile stamen, which mimics a petal and dips into the sac formed by the inflated lip, is pale yellow. The white of our lady's-slipper is the purple and yellow blended together; and we shall find, in general, that when a flower has three colors, two of which are complementary, the third will be white, representing the blending of the other two.
The wild-asters, like the calypso, are of two colors, the color of the ray being, in general, complementary to that of the disk, and thus the most common of our autumnal flowers are pleasing to the eye. The rose and English hawthorn are of one color, which harmonizes with the foliage, as red is the complement of green. But Nature has another side.
The corolla of the closed gentian, which is set in a green calyx, is deep blue. Here is chromatic discord.[1] The "lilac"-colored flowers of the lilac, in contrast with the green leaves, form another discord. No lady would think of dressing in lilac and green.
Our buttercups and golden-rods are yellow. In the golden-rod neither the yellow of the flower nor the green of the foliage is strongly marked, and the contrast is not displeasing. But the bright yellow of the buttercup against the fresh green of the leaves and the spring grass makes a chromatic discord. Green and yellow are not in accord, and Shakespeare, taking green for youth and yellow for jealousy, uses this color-discord with fine effect:
"She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief."
- ↑ Green and blue—green tends to give its complementary, red, to the blue, which renders it more violet; blue tends to give its complementary, orange, to green, which renders it more yellow.
